Time's Mouth
A Novel
-
-
3.4 • 12 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
From New York Times bestselling author Edan Lepucki comes an enthralling saga about family secrets that grow more powerful with time, set against the magical, dangerous landscape of California
Ursa possesses a very special gift. She can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950’s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the woods outside Santa Cruz. Yet Ursa’s powers come with a cost. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting her son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home for Los Angeles and reinvent themselves far from Ursa’s insidious influence. But escaping their past won’t be so easy. A series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone.
Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.
From the forests of Santa Cruz, to the 1980s glam of Melrose Avenue to a solitary mansion among the oil derricks off La Cienega Boulevard, and brimming with the double-edged capacity of memory to both heal and harm, Time’s Mouth is a poignant and evocative excavation of the bonds that bind families together.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
From cults to time travel to complex mother-daughter relationships, this multigenerational drama is simply enthralling. Ursa has the uncanny ability to travel back in time into her own past. This power helps her become the center of a toxic cult, which her teenage son, Ray, hopes to escape with his girlfriend, Cherry. But outrunning trauma can be complicated—both literally and figuratively—especially when their daughter, Opal, turns out to have the same time-tunneling power as her grandmother. By adding this one fantastical element into the mix, Edan Lepucki is able to tell a fascinating and deeply felt story about how dysfunction can travel through generations. There’s a haunting story behind Ursa’s messed-up choices, and Lepucki uses a brilliantly subtle hand to show how that cycle of trauma manifests in Ray’s adult life, too, despite his conscious efforts. This all sets Opal on a path to reconcile her family’s history in a way that’s gripping, inspiring, and utterly unforgettable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lepucki's enjoyable if convoluted latest (after Woman No. 17) follows the exploits of a time-traveling woman and her family's intergenerational curse. Sharon is born in 1938, and at 16 flees her family in Connecticut after discovering a fantastical ability to revisit episodes from her past (she describes it as being "here and there at the same time"), which leads her to believe that her father, who died three years earlier, was abusive. She hitchhikes to California and reinvents herself as Ursa. In the 1970s, Ursa is a single mother raising her son, Ray, at a female-centered Santa Cruz commune, along with other "Mamas" who are drawn to Ursa's mystic time-traveling capabilities. Meanwhile, Ray grows increasingly frustrated at being one of the only males allowed on the property. Eventually, he runs (as his mother once did), and ends up in Southern California with his pregnant girlfriend Cherry. After Ursa's grandchild is born, the runaway cycle repeats. By the end, Lepucki reveals the details behind the trauma Ursa faced as a teen. Extensive asides on Wilhelm Reich's orgone theories and his energy accumulator are bizarre and distracting, though Lepucki deploys plenty of evocative similes (for Ray, guilt feels like "a coat of paint covering his body, drying him into a kind of cast"). Thanks to Lepucki's fine prose, this intrigues more than it frustrates.
